Projects

From July 26 to August 8, 2010, IRG conducted a field test at Haughton Crater in the Canadian Arctic to study how human field work can be augmented with subsequent robot activity. For more information, click here!

Project Lead: Trey Smith
The GeoCam project helps people better understand and respond to disasters. GeoCam consists of a GPS-enabled camera (or cell-phone) and a “live” geospatial workflow. Disaster responders have used GeoCam for urban search and rescue exercises and on-site at major wildfires.+ Visit GeoCam

Project Lead: Terry Fong
The Human Exploration Telerobotics (HET) project explores how advanced telerobotics can improve the productivity of human explorers and increase the performance of human missions. HET is conducting tests and demonstrations of robot systems remotely operated by crew in space and by ground controllers on Earth. HET makes use of the International Space Station (ISS) and a wide variety of robots (Robonaut 2, SPHERES, K10, Centaur 2, and ATHLETE).

Human-Robotic Systems (HRS)

Project Lead: Matt Deans
We are field-testing robots to understand how they can be used to improve human productivity and science return. When humans return to the Moon, crews will initially be on the surface less than 10% of the time. Robots can perform work even when humans are not present, including reconnaissance, survey, and inspection. Field tests: 2007, 2009.

Lunar Mapping and Modeling

Project Lead: Ara Nefian
NASA’s goal of returning humans to the Moon has led to renewed interest in lunar data sets and lunar science. Our work involves processing on an unprecedented scale, using terabytes of data acquired by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and newly processed Apollo camera images.

Project Lead: Ted Scharff
The Neo-Geography Toolkit (NGT) is a suite of automated processing tools
for geospatial data. NGT can transform raster/vector data, metadata and
geo-tagged data into a variety of formats including KML and WTML. NGT is highly
scalable and can process multi-terabyte data sets. NGT was used to help create
WorldWideTelescope | Mars.
+ Visit Neo-Geography Toolkit

Project Lead: Hans Utz
IRG’s Rover Software (RoverSW) is a service-oriented architecture that encapsulates robot functions (locomotion, navigation, localization, instrument control, etc.) as self-contained computing services. With this approach, robotic applications can be built as a collection of on-demand services.

Science Operations for Robots

Project Lead: Matthew Deans
To understand how best to integrate ground-based “backroom” teams into lunar surface operations, we are developing a new ground control team structure and operational protocols. We are testing the ground control with planetary scientists and the NASA JSC Mission Operations Directorate.

Project Leads: Susan Lee and Mark Allan
VERVE is a high-performance, robot user interface that provides scientists, robot operators, and mission planners with powerful, interactive 3D displays of remote environments. VERVE derives from the prior Viz system, which was developed for Mars Polar Lander (2001) and used for the Mars Exploration Rover (2003) and the Phoenix Lander (2008).